Amazon Web Services (AWS) has transformed how businesses functioned in the past. It is a revolutionary platform that offers a host of cloud computing services, including storage, development, security, and infrastructure. About 1.45 million businesses use this platform to support their business, while new enterprises are gradually switching their operations to AWS. As AWS is a market leader in cloud services, preparing for AWS interview questions and answers can be a great step toward landing a career in the field of cloud computing and AWS. So, if you are thinking of a career in AWS, start by familiarizing yourself with the basic concepts. In this page, we have covered all the essential topics you need to know about before starting a career in AWS. So, let’s begin learning and step toward a new career.
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AWS stands for Amazon Web Service; it is a collection of remote computing services also known as a cloud computing platform. This new realm of cloud computing is also known as IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service.
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The key components of AWS are as follow:
- Route 53: A DNS web service
- Simple E-mail Service: It allows sending e-mail using RESTFUL API call or via regular SMTP
- Identity and Access Management: It provides enhanced security and identity management for your AWS account
- Simple Storage Device or (S3): It is a storage device and the most widely used AWS service
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): It provides on-demand computing resources for hosting applications. It is handy in case of unpredictable workloads
- Elastic Block Store (EBS): It offers persistent storage volumes that attach to EC2 to allow you to persist data past the lifespan of a single Amazon EC2 instance
- CloudWatch: To monitor AWS resources, it allows administrators to view and collect keys. Also, one can set a notification alarm in case of trouble.
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Geo-Targeting is a concept where businesses can show personalized content to their audience based on their geographic location without changing the URL. This helps you create customized content for the audience of a specific geographical area, keeping their needs in the forefront.
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RTO or Recovery Time Objective is the maximum time your business or organization is willing to wait for a recovery to complete in the wake of an outage. On the other hand, RPO or Recovery Point Objective is the maximum amount of data loss your company is willing to accept as measured in time.
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Following are the factors to consider during AWS migration:
- Operational Costs – These include the cost of infrastructure, ability to match demand and supply, transparency, and others.
- Workforce Productivity
- Cost avoidance
- Operational resilience
- Business agility
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You would use Provisioned IOPS when you have batch-oriented workloads. Provisioned IOPS delivers high IO rates, but it is also expensive. However, batch processing workloads do not require manual intervention.
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To transfer terabytes of data outside and inside of the AWS environment, a small application called SnowBall is used.
Data transferring using SnowBall is done in the following ways:
- A job is created.
- The SnowBall application is connected.
- The data is copied into the SnowBall application.
- Data is then moved to the AWS S3.
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Connection Draining is a feature provided by AWS which enables your servers which are either going to be updated or removed, to serve the current requests.
If Connection Draining is enabled, the Load Balancer will allow an outgoing instance to complete the current requests for a specific period but will not send any new request to it. Without Connection Draining, an outgoing instance will immediately go off and the requests pending on that instance will error out.
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A Stateful Firewall is the one that maintains the state of the rules defined. It requires you to define only inbound rules. Based on the inbound rules defined, it automatically allows the outbound traffic to flow.
On the other hand, a Stateless Firewall requires you to explicitly define rules for inbound as well as outbound traffic.
For example, if you allow inbound traffic from Port 80, a Stateful Firewall will allow outbound traffic to Port 80, but a Stateless Firewall will not do so.
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A Power User Access provides Administrator Access without the capability to manage the users and permissions. In other words, a user with Power User Access can create, delete, modify or see the resources, but he cannot grant permissions to other users.
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Recovery Time Objective – It is the maximum acceptable delay between the interruption of service and restoration of service. This translates to an acceptable time window when the service can be unavailable.
Recover Point Objective – It is the maximum acceptable amount of time since the last data restore point. It translates to the acceptable amount of data loss which lies between the last recovery point and the interruption of service.
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Amazon VPC can be monitor by using:
- CloudWatch
- VPC Flow Logs
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S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. You can use the S3 interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time and from anywhere on the web. For S3, the payment model is “pay as you go”.
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Key-Pairs are secure login information for your Virtual Machines. To connect to the instances, you can use Key-Pairs which contain a Public Key and a Private Key.
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Amazon S3 is a REST Service, and you can send a request by using the REST API or the AWS SDK wrapper libraries that wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API.
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When AWS creates EC2 instances, there are some blocks of computing capacity and processing power left unused. AWS releases these blocks as Spot Instances. Spot Instances run whenever capacity is available. These are a good option if you are flexible about when your applications can run and if your applications can be interrupted.
On the other hand, On-Demand Instances can be created as and when needed. The prices of such instances are static. Such instances will always be available unless you explicitly terminate them.
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There are three types of load balancers that are supported by Elastic Load Balancing:
- Application Load Balancer: Used if you need flexible application management and TLS termination.
- Network Load Balancer: Used if you require extreme performance and static IPs for your applications.
- Classic Load Balancer: Used if your application is built within the EC2 Classic network.
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Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS services. IAM lets you manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that control which AWS resources users and applications can access.
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The key differences between the IAM role and IAM user are:
- An IAM role is an IAM entity that defines a set of permissions for making AWS service requests, while an IAM user has permanent long-term credentials and is used to interact with the AWS services directly.
- In the IAM role, trusted entities, like IAM users, applications, or an AWS service, assume roles whereas the IAM user has full access to all the AWS IAM functionalities.
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There are two types of scaling – vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling lets you vertically scale up your master database with the press of a button. A database can only be scaled vertically, and there are 18 different instances in which you can resize the RDS. On the other hand, horizontal scaling is good for replicas. These are read-only replicas that can only be done through Amazon Aurora.